A DAY IN THE LIFE OF . . .
AN EARLY YEARS COMMUNITY FOOD WORKER Maryam Bader Associate Nutritionist, Evelina London Since graduating from King’s College London, Maryam has worked for various nutrition charities. She now works for the NHS in the Nutrition and Dietetics service at Evelina London.
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Evelina London is the second largest provider of children’s services in London and is part of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. The children’s community nutrition and dietetics service works with children aged 0-4 years and their families. The service also works with specialist paediatric dietitians who work with children with special needs in the London boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark. The service is made up of two subservices: the Clinical service made up of specialist paediatric dietitians for children with special needs and the nonclinical service consisting of early years community dietitians, nutritionists, community food workers and a vitamin D coordinator who all work with children and families aged 0-4 years. Our team works with parents and children’s centre staff across Lambeth and Southwark, focusing on specific aspects of the children obesity programme by improving the nutrition of children aged 0-4 years through a number of important initiatives. These include: raising awareness of the importance of breastfeeding; working with children’s centre staff to implement the UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative; offering ‘Introduction to solids’ sessions to support weaning; offering practical cooking sessions for children and their families and offering a Free-Vitamin D supplement scheme for pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers in the area. The clinical paediatric dietitians work with parents of children with special needs providing one-to-one clinics at special needs schools and neurodisability multidisciplinary clinics, as well as being part of the behavioural feeding clinics in Lambeth and Southwark. As an Early Years Community Food Worker, my role is to deliver practical
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cooking courses for parents of children aged 0-4 in children’s centres across Lambeth. I deliver ‘Cook and Eat Well’ sessions for parents and ‘Cook and Taste’ for parents and their children. During a typical day or week, I tend to split my time across four main activities: session preparation, session delivery, session review and analysis, and time for internal meetings and CPD. SESSION PREPARATION
Each session requires planning to ensure that I’m providing advice and tips that will prove useful and relevant to the participants. In a community role, it’s particularly important to understand the specific backgrounds, cultures and lifestyles of the community in which you work. The recipes used for the sessions are not only healthy, but are suitable in terms of budget, time consumption and reflect the diverse social and cultural needs of the communities. I believe that this element of understanding is crucial in developing a rapport with the participants and in helping to deliver suitable advice and lasting change. I carry out detailed analysis to help maximise the health benefits of each recipe using our nutrition software, Nutritics, to help to adapt each meal to reduce the fat, salt and sugar content. Finally, as part of my preparation for each session, I also spend time preparing handouts, leaflets and other resources that participants can take away and use at home in their daily lives. These generally include useful hints, tips and
We cover a range of topics from practical cooking tips and techniques to increasing participants’ confidence in using food labels to make healthy food choices for their families . . . information and allow them to remain engaged with what they have learnt in the sessions. ‘COOK AND EAT WELL’ AND ‘COOK AND TASTE’ SESSIONS
On average, I usually deliver three, two-hour sessions per week, each one in a different children’s centre to a different audience. The sessions are primarily aimed at increasing families’ knowledge and confidence in cooking traditional home meals on a budget, whilst ensuring low sugar, salt and fat content. We cover a range of topics from practical cooking tips and techniques to increasing participants’ confidence in using food labels to make healthy food choices for their families, and modelling positive mealtime behaviour to help prevent or manage difficult mealtimes in children. The sessions themselves are usually very interactive. I find it’s important to ensure that sessions are engaging, and that I encourage group discussion and active participation as it provides a better learning experience for everyone. It also allows us all to better understand each other’s challenges and to feel a sense of community and teamwork in approaching these challenges together. This can be hugely important, as group contact can also help to reduce many participants’ feelings of social isolation. As part of each three- to six-week course, I encourage parents to set and reflect on goals each week, to create and review food diaries and to discuss their progress and challenges as a group. I find that these kind of exercises help them to reflect and gradually adopt better and more sustainable eating habits over time. The sessions with children are more geared towards cooking together (this is also great for their motor skills) and getting them more familiar to different types of fruit and vegetables that they might not have seen or tasted before.
SESSION REVIEW AND FEEDBACK
Outside of preparing and delivering sessions, much of my time is spent collating and analysing feedback to reflect on the quality of our service, its impact and how we can continually improve our service and impact within the community. Typically, we measure the improvement in knowledge of the participants and improvements in their eating habits. INTERNAL MEETINGS AND CPD
The remainder of my time is spent on internal activities aimed at improving and developing our service, as well as improving my own technical knowledge and professional development. This includes attending internal team meetings to discuss and review progress and plans, creating marketing materials for our sessions, such as flyers and leaflets for children centres, or posting recipes, healthy eating tips, upcoming session details and interesting news articles on social media. As a team, we are also very passionate about promoting evidence-based nutrition messages, in a simple way that the community will understand. As part of this, the team holds a bi-monthly journal club. A different member of the team selects a journal for every member of the team to read and subsequently discuss and analyse together as a team. From time to time, we also have the opportunity to attend conferences on various nutrition-related topics. Earlier this year, I was able to attend an inspiring breakfast conference hosted by Guy’s & St Thomas’ Charity with Jamie Oliver as one of the panel guests discussing inner city childhood obesity. All of these are great opportunities to continuously learn new things and develop personally and professionally. www.NHDmag.com June 2018 - Issue 135
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